Journey to Hotness

Annnnnnnnd we're back!

2011-04-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, when I moved to LA to fulfill my dream of working for Disney, I arrived weighing no less than 365 pounds. Much of that weight was packed on with unholy stress eating before I moved. Let's just say that the mac N cheese and chicken finger diet wasn't exactly a magical journey to a healthy bod.

Shortly before I moved, I had come down to Anaheim to a preview of Disney's California Adventure. Upon having not been able to get on the Maliboomer (an attraction, I believe, is now gone), I swore that I would lose enough to ride that ride within the year and set upon that path. From February of 2001 to May of 2001, I worked out like a fiend, followed the Suzanne Sommers program of eating, and lost about 45 pounds. Suddenly I could fit on the ride and there was much rejoicing in the land. Oddly enough, however, I was still wearing the same size clothes and had hit a hell of a plateau at 313 that lasted for months and my post 911 depression didn't help much. I gained it all back. It wasn't until I fell in love with my ex “fiance” that I started dropping the weight again, seemingly effortlessly (effortlessly meaning that we ate really healthy, quality foods while we were together and also put each other through some of the most gut wrenching stress imaginable – its hard to know which was more effective). By the time I finally got him to move out, I was at the lowest weight I've seen since I was 21 ...285. The idea that I should hit that in a couple of months, at this rate, fully blows my mind and if you've been keeping up with my journey, it's not exactly been like skipping through a frickin' field of daisies.

When I got to that weight the last time, there was still a lot of crap rattling around in my emotional cache that I hadn't even begun to address, much less eradicate. When my relationship was ending, I made a decision to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted and to hell with trying to get thin for some man. The last thing I wanted was a man to so much as LOOK at me, much less want to get together with me and dictate my eating habits by suggesting that his future and image were threatened by my flabby ass. Naturally the irony is that my ex completely changed careers toward the end of our relationship and is now enjoying the longest string of success he's probably had since he left college and his image means absolutely nothing to that success. But for me, living in LA and being largely attracted to more creative types, that bullshit coming back to bite me was just inevitable. And baby, it's been back time and again. There's nothing like getting to know an amazing man who happens to be in the entertainment industry and finding out that his major fatal flaw, is that he wouldn't date me because it could ruin his image. That is not to say they don't find me attractive. They do. They just wouldn't dare admit it to their friends, their agent, who the hell ever they feel like they need to impress.

Yes... this place really IS like that.

My plan backfired. I gained a shitload of weight, got super busy, got older, got wobbly and achy and subsequently heavier and heavier. I've made some really dumb decisions in my life. Some of them have cost me tons of money, jobs, friends, lovers... but deciding to gain weight to keep men away from me was not only totally ineffective, it was potentially fatal.

I may have a post on here that mentions all of this, but frankly... its worth RE-mentioning. Why? Because as we all know, the stuff of life is about a series of choices. I've been questioning this one, despite the positive results (just because it makes me feel craptastic). If I have one piece of advice that will keep you from ever having to get to the scary place I've been, it's this: “Act... don't react.” Before you do anything drastic out of emotional, mental, or any other kind of heightened distress, consider the consequences and the possibility that shit may go down in your life that will make it hard to take your choice back.

Twenty more pounds, and I'll never see the top side of 300 again. I can't flippin' WAIT!

What did I DO?

2011-04-04T18:28:00.000-07:00

A month into the new journey or weight loss surgery, I have all kinds of crap rattling around in my head and my heart and I guess it was time that I get off my ass and share some of it. Here goes.

First, I just want to start off by saying that having the surgery was the right decision for me in a number of ways. It truly had to happen. I spent too much time losing a giant amount of weight, only to still be wearing the same clothes, unable to see any results other than what was on the scale, and feeling like I would never see the end of the struggling portion of the show. My usual cut off was about 70 pounds. Seventy pounds is a HELL of a lot of weight for ANYONE to lose! But for me, it barely scratched the surface. I would lose hope, then momentum, then interest. Part of the plan with this surgery, was to literally ensure that I couldn’t “give up.” I now have a bit of a failsafe, in that I will literally become violently ill if I try to eat craptastic food that’s no good for me. For chrissakes, I get sick even when I eat what’s GOOD for me!

Now all that said, I’ve spent the last week wondering, “WHAT THE HELL DID I DO TO MYSELF?!” Sure, I’ve lost quite a bit of weight so far. People who see me say it’s really noticeable. I guess it must be, since I can sit comfortably in my jeans for the first time since I purchased them six years ago. Oh yeah, I’ve not been comfy in these damned things for SIX YEARS! That’s a long time to wait to fit into one’s clothes. At any rate, yes… I’m noticing. Still, getting thinner wasn’t the ultimate goal. Getting healthy and literally lighter is the ultimate goal. Losing my taste for food was not the plan. Being unable to consume virtually anything at the moment, is pissing me off in the most profound ways. And right now, I have ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD to think about how much that sucks. I try not to. I’m just sayin’…

I’m sure that there will be some who will read this and say, “What did you expect?!” Really… I didn’t expect water to make me nauseous. I love water! It shows in my gorgeous skin. Now, water makes me sick and actually hurts to drink. I know that will pass but having to get in 48 to 64 ounces is definitely not happening because of how drinking makes me feel. I expected to feel full fast, and considered that to be the ultimate plus side to this plan. Yup, I sure do feel full fast. That’s if I am able to stomach what food I actually manage to keep down. I’m not throwing up a lot, but just sitting here an trying to think of more than one thing I’ve eaten since the surgery that didn’t have a few moments of “uh oh” is difficult. While I am craving things like salads and steak (which I cannot have), the idea of eating virtually anything, no matter what, makes me nauseous.

The thing is, I truly enjoy eating delicious food. Flavor, to me, is worth living for. It’s not about eating copious amounts of fattening foods, or greasy crap, or even sweets. It thrills me that eating In N Out would make me vomit immediately! Keeps me from thinking I should EVER put it in my body again and that‘s super okay with me! In fact, I’d rather eat a light pasta dish over cheesecake any day of the week (both are off the menu for at least the next two years). My friend Stephanie makes this avocado and spinach salad that I’ve been craving since I had it a year ago, and I would blow chunks if I even attempted it! That blows!!! I’m craving salad like nobody’s business!

Lets face it, for most of the last 30 years, my eating habits haven’t been about focused on flavor and the consumption of “good” food (when I could and did eat “good food“ regularly, I lost weigh like a mad woman - finances have made that more than a little difficult). It’s been largely about eating what I could afford and filling the enormous hole in my gut. That’s a HUGE change and one that’s becoming excruciating to deal with at the moment.

But… one hurdle at a time, no?

Soothing myself has taken on a whole new unpleasant tone. Nothing soothes me right now. The sensation of flavor and texture in some foods used to be the only thing I had to do that (and have been using it for that reason since I was little). Just the sound of stirring macaroni was like a lullaby to my nerves. People see me as an extremely difficult person to console or comfort so I don‘t get a whole lot of it. So here I am going through one of the biggest changes of my life and I took away my only easy calmer. Every day, I have to talk myself out of thinking I screwed up my life by having this surgery. Last Friday I sat in my therapist’s office crying my eyes out and saying, “Every time I try to make a decision to make my life better, I end up making it ten times worse! I no longer trust my own decisions!”

His response was, “REALLY?! But you made the right decision for the right reason! That‘s the least screwed up thing you‘ve done since we met!” I’d love to say that makes me feel better. I’m positive it will and I will look back on this time and be glad I somehow made it through. Right now, I feel like beating myself up and several times a day, I spend all my energy stopping the urge.

On the plus side, I have certainly noticed is that I feel foolish for insisting on the full fat or full sodium versions of certain foods, now that I’ve become accustomed to them. Low Sodium V8... Frickin’ delicious! WTF?! Why didn’t I keep a bottle of this in the fridge at work ALL ALONG?! Tell you what, I’m gonna now! Texturally speaking, yes… lo-fat cream of chicken soup is funky. But my usual application for it is to make greek lemon chicken soup. Aside from the fact that I cannot have rice, I cannot imagine that the difference would be detectible now. Still… there’s not a whole lot of options right now for flavor. I’m in the “soft foods” phase of my post surgical diet. Mashed potatoes, refried beans, laughing cow cheese, scrambled eggs are largely what I’m living on right now. I’m gonna get REALLY CREATIVE before this is over! If I wasn’t sick to damned death of chicken broth I‘d make a kick ass chicken soup (the idea of it makes me want to barf right now, since I got so pumped full of IV fluids and broth the day after my surgery that it made me ill for a week and a half).

So to answer your question of “How are you doing?” That’s how I’m doing. I’m fine. I’m sad, I’m nervous, I’m excited, I’m impatient. I’m also broke, or I’d be in San Jose giving and receiving boatloads of love. And friends, friends, friends… as always you keep me sane, keep me from losing my hope, remind me that I am loved and cared for. Even if the darkest moments of doubt and fear, knowing you are there, backing me, keeps me going. Thank you! Thank you… THANK YOU!!!

The path gets a bit more clear…

2011-03-10T00:55:00.001-08:00

It's officially the day before I am to have gastric bypass surgery. The thoughts going through my head right now are probably not what you'd imagine. Sure, some of them are the usual I hope nothing bad happens during the surgery, I hope I don't forget to pack my toothbrush, dear God I'm not looking forward to the Magnesium Citrate. Yet largely, I am thinking of how I've come to this place, the unknowns that lie beyond tomorrow and reeling over how much this will change my life.

Naturally the health aspect is going to change my life for the better. No arguing there, and that is the main reason for taking this risk. Tandem to that reason is that giving myself a healthy body to deal with is another giant step toward more empowering and profound self-respect. I genuinely love myself, and it took a lot of struggle to figure out how to make that more obvious to myself (and others). While I don't think of myself as unworthy of respect because I'm fat, at the end of the day, I wouldn't treat one of my beloved friends the way I've been treating my body. That's been circling around my mind for a few years. There was just a bit more to work out emotionally and mentally before I could take this step, and Dr. Dick (my therapist) has helped with that tremendously.

What's important for me to remember, and to point out here, is that the success of this undertaking is on me and it is NOT an easy fix. I honestly think that many of my co-workers (who are all aware of what I'm doing), think I'm going to come back thin. I've had to explain to many of them, that this isn't like a tummy tuck. I'm not on Extreme Makeover. I'm not going to walk back into work a month from now looking like a supermodel. There's work to be done and my doing this is not just to ensure that I lose weight, but the making of a permanent commitment to myself to make the rest of my life a healthy one.

I have never been thin in my mind. Never. Even when I was thin, I was being convinced by my mother that I was a disgusting monster. I will be treated differently. That isn't a guess. I believe I'm now in a place where I can withstand that emotionally and mentally without it effecting my commitment. But man… its going to bring some shit up! Just going to have to cross that bridge when it does and deal.

I'm worried I will be ugly once the weight is off. Seem strange? I'll bet it does.

I'm concerned about the financial strain this will put on me, when I already make next to nothing in the shittiest economy I've known. I'm sure I'll find a way to muddle through.

I'm excited.

I'm hopeful.

I'm ready.

Let it begin…

2010-06-23T16:41:00.001-07:00

NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about my weight loss program for a number of reasons, but not the least of which is that life – as usual – trumped this journey and frankly fucked with my momentum in the ugliest of all possible ways.

After having lost almost 50 pounds, and having done reasonably well not snarfing anything I could with the excuse of celebrating my birthday, I got word that I would have to move out of my home by the end of May. That word came to me while driving my cat to the first of four trips to the vet (which turned out to be an infection brought on by the festering nastiness that was growing in my roommate’s bedroom as it mysteriously vanished almost instantly once we moved). Money went from somewhat tight to downright unavailable and thus the first thing that had to go was the program. Now (especially after having seen this photo)

...I am chomping at the bit to get back on the horse and ride like hell.

How many dieters wouldn’t just love a good excuse to not stick to their program like that? I mean, you cannot dispute lack of funds. We’re talking about something that generally costs about $350 a month for the program products and then I’m supposed to find an additional budget for “real” food on top of it, for the one lean-green meal a day. To give you an idea of how realistic that is, my current food budget for the next month looks like this: 6/24-7/1 $10, 7/2-7/8 $10, 7/9-7/16 $30, 7/17-7/23 $40. In the meantime I’m going to be living off of Pasta and for the first time in my life, I am NOT happy to have to eat pasta. NOT HAPPY!

The good news (oh yes, I can still see a glimmer of silver lining to all this), is that my mindset is such that I WANT to be on program. I want to succeed and finish this goal. That is frustrating since I can’t right now, but it’s also hopeful in that I honestly don’t remember a time when I ever felt that way before; Where I had the chance to totally justify, in my mind, dropping the whole thing and going back to stress/boredom eating, and didn’t want to take it and run. Albeit I ate a couple of things this past weekend, at Disneyland, that I never ever eat, I know I won’t ever need to revisit one of the items and can easily live another year before I have the one I did like.

I said I would give this program a year. Since I had to take April, May and June off, that means the year will end almost literally on my 42nd birthday. Suddenly, I have something amazing to look forward to again!

Never give up, never surrender!

Forward

2010-03-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

It’s been almost an entire month since my last posting, and ugh… what a month. I’ll spare you the gory details and any suspense of that which kept me from you, other than to say that the usual things that conspire to eviscerate my dreams of weight loss have NOT… I repeat… NOT overcome me.

I am still on program… mostly. Bad planning on my part (or rather wishful thinking in terms of my ability to consume everything my kind friends gave me) left me with only inedible foods for the last week and half and I was forced to live mainly on “real” food.

Dear LORD! Wise choices this early in the game?! Absolutely! Despite some of the most ungodly stress, I managed to not go nuts (i.e. large pots of macaroni and cheese or loads of bread or pasta).

Have I always made the right ones? Nope. Sure haven’t. But even when I made a couple naughty decisions that I knew weren’t the best, a good result yielded from that choice. Either I realized that I don’t “need” whatever it was that I felt like I had to have; or not having had it in my system for a while meant that the experience of eating it, and it’s presence in my body, was a tremendously different feeling than it used to be. When you’re not consuming mountains of salt or sugar and you suddenly introduce something extremely high in either content back into your body, I guarantee, if you’re not in a coma… you’re going to notice the effect in a deeply significant way. Suffice it to say, I am officially over In-N-Out burgers. I wasn’t that big of a fan before. Now, they’re dead to me.

Little side tangent here… there’s a “Healthy Express” drive thu a couple of blocks from the pottery studio I belong to. I drive past it every time I go in and wonder how “healthy” their food really is and I fantasize of a truly healthy drive thru; a place where you can easily get a pint or quart of freshly steamed, herbed veggies (that’s not just broccoli and carrots), where you can get a freshly broiled chicken breast cut into small pieces to go with your veggies, and a freshly brewed iced tea. Or better yet, where you can get where you can get grilled, lean, marinated steak and Portobello mushrooms and a lightly dressed slaw wrapped in lettuce leaves (like a wrap), with a light pesto-esque dipping sauce. In my mind, there is a market. I’m sure that if I were to ask the people in my life, they would say the same. But on the whole? Not so much. I highly doubt the majority of the people in America would partake of such a thing. Fast food, in their mind, means greasy, salty indulgences. Not, “quick, healthy, nutritious and tasty.” So, I’m going to let that go-ahead and be a dream… for now.

My next food order arrives tomorrow, and not a moment too soon. I’m ready. Ready to take on the next few months of this project. Ready to get more weight off. Ready to feel lighter and more energetic. Ready to keep moving forward. That’s ultimately what this is all about… to keep moving forward.

My first OMG moment of the program!

2010-03-04T16:03:00.000-08:00

It's been a little over a month since I began the Take Shape For Life program. To say that it has not been an easy month would be a ridiculous understatement. Work was utter hell, was trying to deal with selling a property in New York (that we've been trying to sell for a year and a half), and lots of weird health issues meant making the transition into the year of this program a less than smooth one. Still I feel pretty aclimated to the food and routine on most levels. Here's what's been going on...

Health: I have a lot more energy. No bones about that! Sometimes, so much so, that I feel a little "high". I'll chalk that up to the drastic change from being so "Blah" I could barely move (and rarely wanted to). Now the downside, something's throwing off my hormones in a really unhappy way. I've seen the doctor but all we can come up with is a vitamin deficiency, but I've had what feels akin to major PMS for a month. Wrenched back, constant spotting, pressure/bloating, major mood swings. One minute the pain's there, the next it's gone, then it's back, then it's gone, etc. NOT fun. It seems to be subsiding now. We'll see.

Hunger: Not hungry. I'm still not wanting to eat as much as I need to. Even tho most of it is drinking since I ran out of anything crunchy a week or so ago. I will say this, when I don't eat on time (and it's rare that I don't), I actually FEEL hungry. I wasn't experiencing that before, because I think I'd slowed my metabolism down so severely that it no longer sent me true hunger triggers. I'm still going through the struggle of "food = bad, less food = good" in my head. Intellectually I get it, but I guess it's still so planted in my psyche that it's like a frickin' weed! I keep working on it tho.

Naughty: Yup, I've fallen off the wagon once or twice. I'm not going to get upset about it either. I've got a year of this program and I'm going to make it, even if it means "training wheels." Also, I'm not ready to get up at 7:30 in the morning on my weekends just to eat. Not. Not at all. Nope! But once I get my next shipment, I AM willing to keep bars by my bedside, wake up, eat my bar, and go back to sleep. THAT I can do. The important thing is that during my waking hours I follow it. Even after a concert, sitting in an IHOP, staring at my piece of garlic toast and thinking I could get away with it. There was talk of having it taken away. I said, "No. I need to be a big girl about not eating that. It's not worth it."

Nice: Having told co-workers about my program has actually worked to my advantage thus far. It's kept me honest. They're rooting for me. People are starting to notice the difference and tell me so. Are there those who are making "suggestions" that won't work with the program? Sure. Of course. But for once, they seem reasonable about backing down. Noticing that my pants are much looser has been pretty sweet too. But the thing that I am currently wild about... my inner thighs. For a while, they had gotten so big that I could feel them pushing my legs apart when I walked. It was killing my hips. Now, not so much. I can totally feel the difference. That's making me pretty happy. If that's where I am 30 pounds down, I can't wait to feel what it's like 180 pounds down!

Truth: This program is not cheap and I am not wealthy. Having to come up with an alternate food budget on top of the program budget has thrown off the rest of my finances in a truly unpleasant way. I'm having to constantly borrow from next week to pay for something I need this week. My entertainment budget (which is more necessary than ever, considering that food was my entertainment up until recently), has all but vanished. I'm still trying to work that out. It's not easy. But most of that is because I don't make enough money. That's another something I'm working on.

Forward: Now that I've gotten an idea of what tastes good, what I can sustain myself on, etc, I think month #2 is going to go a lot smoother. The next shipment is all stuff I like enough to want to eat five times a day. The food I have to consume until it comes... oh LORD! It's gonna be a tough couple weeks!!! LOL

Stay tuned... more to come!

Day 11: Well on my way

2010-02-04T18:27:00.000-08:00

Since I received my food delivery on January 22, I did a bit of a “soft start” over that weekend with the intention of having the full start be the following Monday. As of February 2nd I have lost 12 program pounds. Not a bad start at all. Getting ready to begin the program I probably shot myself in the foot by going to all the places I believed I would miss and eating what I wanted. Even so, I know I had to have taken some of the “overage” from the last year off before my first weigh in. At my recent biggest, I was easily 380. Getting that close to 400 is terrifying and I felt the weight swallowing me up. Oh LORD, I felt it. Now, waving goodbye to 360 (I’m at 356 right now), I know I will never get on a scale and see those numbers again (unless I’m standing on a scale WITH someone! LOL) and there’s nothing sad about that.

Having been on MANY, many weight loss programs before, I know that at my size, caloric and sodium consumption, that water weight is the first to go. If you had seen my swollen feet and fingers a month ago, you’d probably wonder why I didn’t lose more weight in water. At night, I would pretty much be walking on balloons, after sitting all day, with little circulation. With my fingers, the change in that loss was so noticeable, that Tuesday they caught my eye while I was reaching for something and literally startled me into staring at them. They looked a bit as though they were recently popped balloons themselves; a little wrinkly and definitely slimmer.

How am I feeling? That’s a really good question. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the feeling in my gut is. I find it hard to believe that it’s hunger all the time, since there’s so much stress and anxiety (about other, harder things in my life) occupying that space. Whatever that feeling is, it’s not compelling me to eat things I shouldn’t or even eat when I’m not scheduled to. In fact, I’m still having a hard time getting all the meals in per day. I’m making it more now than I was, but still… hard. Energy wise, I couldn’t be happier. I mean, I’m still waddling around in a 356 pound body, so it’s not like I’m signing up for marathons just yet, but I get around a lot easier. Again, I noticed on Tuesday that a trip up the ramp of the parking structure at work used to wind me, and I flew up with ease that night. Seeing where this is heading is so exciting, I can’t stand it!

Something that I find startling, is how BAD my post-work routine had gotten and how much I came to deeply depend on FLAVOR (not necessarily being naughty) to soothe me. I’ll admit now to having consumed in abundance, enjoying the sensation of taste, while not enjoying the effect the food was having on my body. All this because of how unhappy I was at work and then I became just as unhappy to be at home. Even now, I have a hard time getting out of the car when I get home, because I just don’t want to go in. I will also admit… that I was well aware of the choice I was making. It had just come to a point of deciding that food would be the lesser evil of abundant alcohol or some sort of drugs (neither of which are my thing). The further I get away from two serving meals, the more I seriously question THAT rationale. But I do remember one night thinking, “This has got to stop!” and my own mind answering, “I don’t have any physical contact with someone loving. Am I to deprive myself of EVERY physical pleasure?”

It’s difficult to detail how much life struggle is strangling my insides, especially my stomach (where I hold my stress) and how flavor seemed to make better. So there’ll be no “I have NO idea how I got here” quotes from me on this blog. I know exactly how I got here, and I know exactly how I’m getting out and not EVER getting back to this place.

This weekend I start working out again. Thrilled. Simply… thrilled.

Day Five: Figuring it out

2010-01-29T03:07:00.001-08:00

It's 2 am on the morning of my fifth day. As with any large undertaking, there is a period of adjustment and let's face it... mine is just beginning.

Monday wasn't bad, though I didn't make it to meal six. I was so tired of eating that I went home and crawled in bed without having had my lean and green. Tuesday was better, had leftover steak in the fridge (from my Death Row dinner on Sunday), but no veggies. Money's been super tight. Shopping hasn't been a priority. Already, I'm seeing how things have gone from questionable to downright idiotic in my eating habits in the past. Puttin' an end to that nonsense right away.

Wednesday was the welcome lunch for my new boss, and I worried that dining out would be a problem, but it really wasn't. Had the most delicious seafood salad, that was completely on program and would probably not have been my choice otherwise. Funny how that works. Then after I got out of my photography class, I found myself unable to stomach the idea of another sweet thing, and was a craving savory, salty, meaty something. Thinking I would still try to be "good", I got a protien style hamburger from Carl's Jr. EPIC DISASTER! My body HATED that choice and I got a bit sick.

A couple of mornings this week, I've woken up lightheaded and a bit woozy to the tummy. I'm taking this as part of my body adjusting to things. Suddenly giving up Diet Coke, I suspect, had everything to do with feeling super sick and having the world's most heinous headache. Its happened before when I tried to give DC up, so I know this will pass.

I can already see how I am going to survive on this program. Mostly it will come down to bars and the drinks and the crisps. They're all palatable, if not obnoxiously sweet, and FAR better than I would otherwise choose during the course of my day. Now that I'm about to get back into the pottery studio, it's going to be even more essential to have “good” meals be that easy and handy.

As for changes thus far, I have been remiss in measuring myself. I will this weekend. But I can already tell you that my body is feeling much different. My clothes are already looser, my feet and ankles aren't swollen by the end of a day of sitting at my desk, my energy is high, my mood is pretty good and while my hormones are clearly going through a shock / adjustment I suspect that will get on track soon enough.

Now, as I lay my head down to catch a few Zzzzs before work, I can still taste that horrible chemical aftertaste in my mouth. I'll get used to it. After all, I didn't always like Diet Coke.

This weekend, creating inspiration...

Take Shape For Life – Day One:

2010-01-25T18:17:00.000-08:00

To say that I’m excited about finally starting this program would be a crass understatement. Ever since I decided this was the move I wanted to make, I’ve been feeling like a revved up racehorse, anxiously waiting for the starter gun to go off. Getting the order placed for the first month’s food was a trial in and of itself (and less so thanks to KJ), but once that obstacle was overcome it became clear that another, more daunting task lay ahead; figuring out which of these “meals” are going to be palatable for the duration of the program.

Right away I’ll be frank and say that the oatmeal is one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten. I suspect the pretense of sweetener is the culprit, nevertheless a wholly unsatisfying experience in terms of flavor and texture. Was I full? Pretty much, I’m shocked to admit. If nothing it else, that chemical aftertaste served as a severely good motivation to drink more water! HA! My TSFL Heath Coach assures me that my taste buds will adjust. That may be. I feel like maybe I could just do without the oatmeal and eat something else. After all this program is about getting the weight off, developing a life-long healthy relationship with food and convenience of not having to count calories and spend my whole weekend fixing meals in advance. It’s not to retrain my taste buds to enjoy food that isn’t actually delicious. I would genuinely hate that. Good food is art to me. I certainly wouldn’t let someone jab out my eyes just because gazing at Calder mobiles all day made me tubby!

That said, some of this stuff actually is reasonably tasty. Right away, I can tell that the Mint Chocolate bars are going to be a regular go-to. I’m sure there are those who would find this ironic, but I don’t crave and choose to eat sweets very often and a lot of this stuff gears toward the sweet tooth. Usually, I do want a little sweet thing after a particularly savory meal, but often a mint would do just fine and any over-consumption of candies has been due to having nothing else quick to grab out of the machine at work. So when I look at the vast majority of the food in the big box that arrived on Friday, I find these questions coming to mind, “Will this program cause me to crave sweets as a result? Or will I have so many sweet things that I pretty much never want anything sweet again?” Time, I suppose, will tell.

Its 5:39 and I’ve just eaten meal FIVE of the day. I can’t believe I still have one more to eat. I’m sitting here thinking, “Dear GOD, I don’t think I can fit any more in.” The reality is that I don’t normally eat this much which is largely why I have been packing the weight on. The assumption that all big people are constantly “hoovering” in mass quantities of snack cakes and bacon and cleaning out the buffets is, at this point, ridiculously ignorant. Some do! But we all get to this place by different routes. For me, lately, my bane has been lacking time and appetite, crossed with 12 hours of sitting at a desk. Generally I would eat two big meals a day. One at lunch time (then sit), then one after work (and sleep). Even with waiting three hours before bed, your body isn’t going to kick in the metabolism that way. So eating constantly during the day is momentarily a massive shock to my body. It’s not as though the meals are huge. But the cocoa is really filling (which I had for meal three) and it took me a while to drink it while I work. The bars aren’t huge either, but if you listen to your body, they fill you enough without making you feel like pleasant. Even the heinous oatmeal put a dent in my hunger quite easily and I had soy crisps for a snack. So four meals and a snack more than I’m used to having by this time of day, I am stuffed! I’m fine. I avoided not one but TWO birthday cakes, donuts, scones, pizza and hot wings… and there is no part of me that feels deprived.

It’s all about deciding that this is what I want… to succeed. There will still be cake when I’m done. There will still be hot wings and pizza. I may not want them or crave them, but if I do, they will be there. And by then, I will be working out so regularly and living so much healthier that one indulgence won’t kill me. So even with the horrid oatmeal, I feel well supported for the road ahead.

Coming soon... the before photo and measurements!

A new journey begins.

2010-01-18T02:59:00.000-08:00

A year ago, on March 27, I commented to a friend about how much slimmer she looked. I was thrilled for her, knowing she'd wrestled with how to get the weight off previously and she explained that she and her boyfriend had gone on a program that she found through her friend Anita and that Anita would be at her birthday party the following night if I wanted to learn more about it.

At the time, I remember my stomach tying in knots. It always does when someone has a suggestion about how I can lose weight. I'm always fearful that they're going to become dogged about it with me, checking on every weigh in, watching everything I eat (which has happened to me so many times I've lost count). Even now, I can't be certain if the vomiting and headache that ensued later that night and for the entirety of the next two days (thus disallowing me to go to the party) was the over-exposure to the sun or some kind of resistance to being approached by a diet peddler. Perhaps it was both.

Five months later, at the boyfriend's birthday party, I finally met Anita. In fact I probably spent nearly the entire party talking with her about various things, and even a bit about the program she works with called Take Shape For Life, which (as I understand it thus far) is a combination of the Medifast diet and personalized support from a Health Coach (ie. Anita).

I can't say now what made me think this program would be the right one for me. After all, I know I can lose weight with the Suzanne Sommers diet. I have, I do. But I think it came down to a combination of things. First, the testimonies from my friends who had utilized the program, third-person testimonies and finally one of the biggest draws... not having to think about food for a while.

It may sound strange to hear, but a good deal of the weight carry now is largely due to being utterly sick to death of trying to figure out today what I want to eat tomorrow and so on. Then there's the lack of refrigerator/freezer space where I live, the fact that we've had a barely functioning stove/oven for the last two years and the stress of a constantly changing job. The idea, right now, of having all my meals be thought out and ready is like a miracle. Finally, I had asked my doctor about eight years ago (when I'd lost a considerable amount of weight and hit a horrible plateau I couldn't get past) to put me on a meal replacement program and was denied. Instead I was offered drugs that would cost me $200 a week and would most likely be the cause of my regularly losing my bowels. Nothing like a little anal leakage amongst friends, right? So this was the kind of thing I'd hoped for and when I couldn't get it through my doctor, had pretty much given up. I can't describe the demoralization that comes from having lost 70 pounds and still be wearing the same clothing size and to know you've put in ungodly amounts of work and sacrificed to see nearly no results. It finally came down to this being a bit of a no brainer.

Still as appealing as this program sounded, and as fed up as I am with carrying around all the excess weight, there was a major hurdle... cost. Coming up with 300 dollars a month for food has been impossible. It'd be one thing if the food would show up at my door the next day, but I'd still have to eat and pay for life's little expenditures in the mean time. So although I had originally set a date to place the order in December, it took until now to get it situated.

Last night I finally placed the order and I couldn't be more excited. I know it's not going to be a complete cake walk (so to speak). Most of my socializing is done around food for a very good reason! It's economically more sensible. It's very difficult to have separate budgets for food AND entertainment. And now, knowing that orders are going to be automatically generated every month, I'm going to have to crack down even harder. But I know I can do it. I AM DOING IT. A year from now, I will be finally be able to look into the mirror and see myself without having to look beyond the pain and bad choices of my past.

Admittedly I'm scared of the changes that will inevitably come with this commitment. I know there will be some great benefits, but there will be loose skin (which will require surgery to remove) and some social changes that I have found difficult to deal with in the past. You can never underestimate how many people that are around you that need you to stay the same.

Still I've spent a lot of time besting demons and dealing with the past so I can go forward and not ever go back. I'm working again on my book, so I can purge all the stuff that haunts me, and once it's out, I won't look back. There's no need. In any journey there will always be a place of origin, I don't plan on ever going back, so there's no point in remembering how to get there.

Nearly Another Six Months, and Nearer to 40

2009-03-31T03:03:00.000-07:00

Whew! Another five months has gone by and I still can't believe how much has been packed into that time. What hasn't been packed in is the gym. FRUSTRATING!!!!

Getting a schedule together is a priority, and hasn't been one while learning the new job (and by new job, I refer to the one that replaced the one I accepted in October). Gym shoes are a must and so is some idea of how to deal with my hair and pool time.

The weight is trickling off slowly. Like most folks, I'd rather it go racing off of me, but that' s just not how it works in the real world. Surgery is not an option. Oddly enough, I'm still too healthy. Never mind the unholy pain in my hip, over-burdened knees and wobbly bits that make a short trip on a treadmill a living nightmare. There are, as usual, bigger fish to fry. Right now... my teeth are taking center stage.

Now I've always wanted a pearly, gorgeous grill full of teeth, but no such luck. I didn't really learn good brushing habits until I was well into my 20s and was denied braces when growing up. Seems the money was better spent on cigarettes and a camper trailer - both of which I was not to enjoy. So now it's on me and I'm still trying to decide if I should go through with it.

My end of the bargain would be about 3k, even with benefits. Seems an orthodontist told my mom when I was still young enough to have it not cost a fortune, that I needed the roof of my mouth split apart or my bite would grow increasingly awkward. Sucking my thumb for a great length of my life wouldn't help either. Now, the splitting would involve surgery.

Surgery? Uh... I don't even like needles in my mouth, much less a goddamned buzz saw! And to say that I can't afford the luxury of a gorgeous smile would be an understatement. So I do what I can to just keep my teeth from falling out of my mouth.

But one of these days I'm going to get them all sparklied up and ready to dazzle, just like the rest of me.

Look out 40... here I come.

Six months later

2008-10-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

It's been a bit over six months (almost seven) since my last post to this blog. So much has happened; so much that has aged me and threatened to make me lose my way. I can't say I've not veered a little, but I can say that I'm still headed in the right direction.

Working again, I have to admit, helps. Now that I'm working near my gym, it's going to be much easier to get there. Now the trick is to figure out the right hours to go, when I can actually get on the machines and in the pool. Having long hair, also means that I'll need extra time for hair maintenance. Hmm, maybe a swim cap (then rubber smelling hair? what's the lesser of two evils, I wonder)?

In the last six months, I have lost so much. Little of it has been weight, even though I have often been without appetite and therefore not eating. Unlike some, I don't lose when I don't eat. I gain or just get sick. In the last year, I've thrown up more over stress and anxiety than I have in my whole life (and it's not like I've always been cruising at party altitudes for the past thirty years)! I have also had to eat food that I know is not good for me or is something I have trouble digesting, because it's cheap. Love the veggies, but they don't keep you filled up for long.

Having health benefits is going to work well with this journey. I'm planning to get a full exam and get some much needed procedures done (like seeing a dermatologist for the funky bump on my cheek for which I have the fine LA air - and my inability to afford facials - to thank). More importantly, I'm going to be working with my doctor to see a nutritionist or perhaps look into bariatric surgery. I still have a sliver of hope that I might be a mother one day and this body is the wrong vessel for it.

Still, a dark cloud hovers overhead. I've been through too much too recently. My focus is on fighting for and working toward my future as well as my present, and the demons that need vanquishing are the cause of all the bad weather that follows me around. Right now, I am gathering the strength and the stamina to blow those clouds away. And I think the more I take care of myself, the more my journey will be fueled.

I'm just glad I never gave in. I never completely tossed in the towel. I always kept this goal in mind and did my best not to use stress as a reason to hurt myself. Learning is good. Changing for the better, is gold. Try it. You might like it.

Breakdown on the Journey...

2008-04-08T21:06:00.001-07:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything about my journey to hotness. If you know anything about what’s been going on in my life, you’d know why this has been somewhat low on my priority list. But it is worth mentioning, here, that losing one’s sense of self in the melee of stress that is unemployment is something to be watched, something to be concerned about. It is in these times that it becomes easy to forget where we are heading, forget our goals, forget things that are important to us and forget to concentrate on those things rather than the bill collectors and interviewers in one’s life.

I have not let go, have not given up. I am still working on how I feel about myself, my look, my hotness as it were. However, it is true that the trials of life have just reached a fever pitch that I can no longer ignore. I am sleeping too much lately. Sometimes, I am sleeping too little. But I am also drinking pitchers of water that I normally don’t have time to drink while working. My hair is falling out, I have sores on my head from compulsive nervous scratching (even cutting off my nails hasn't helped this) and I have unholy pains in my muscles. Yet I still am trying to get to the gym whenever possible. In fact, that last time I was there, rockin’ out to AC/DC on the seated bench press machine, a sweaty but handsome Tommy Shaw from Styx nearly snuck past me after a basketball game.

Something that cannot be overlooked, is how easily one’s self image can get tied up in money problems. I mean, first off… I’ve not been able to get a hair cut in months. That’s not to say my hair is too bad, but it doesn’t look nice and healthy and taken care of. Surely an interviewer will notice my brittle ends. My skin looks like someone has been regularly beating me. I have bumps that I cannot fathom. A facial would be exquisite right now. Exquisite and financially retarded. My food intake has largely been Barilla pasta (yummy, but not with this much regularity). Those 10 for 10 dollar sales are awesome when one wants to avoid the nutritional backslide that is ramen, but that much processed pasta takes it’s toll. It just does. So right now, for the most part, I seem to be in defense mode… making sure that all the horrible after effects of poverty don’t do maximum damage. And every now and then, I put on an outfit that makes me feel… attractive-ish. I even wore my lovely velvety high heals to the hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint to have dinner with Skari. Made it harder than hell to get in and out of her car, what with all the aches and pains, but dammit… I wanted to feel girly! It’s rare I really go out any more!

And so it seems that I have taken a small detour on my journey. It’s as though my karmic car broke down in some bum-fuck-egypt town and I have to wait for a part that is nigh on impossible to procure. While I wait, I am still tweezing my brows and winking at myself in the mirror, just so I can remember who I am… and where I’m headed. That is, heading toward my happiness… inside and out.

My Crush on Mr. Spock Comes Full Circle

2008-01-26T08:19:00.000-08:00

Recently, during a chat with a friend, I suddenly realized that my two most major relationships were with men who bear a striking physical resemblance to Mr. Spock, of the original Star Trek series. I can remember finding him attractive at a very, very early age. My first crush, when I was five, was on a 22 year old friend of my cousin's who was, shock of all shocks, tall, lean, dark haired and of lowish voice. But I say that my fascination was with Spock, rather than the Leonard Nimoy,who portrayed the character (for those of you just crawling out of your cave or the womb or both) because the attraction was a full package. The "package" I refer to, of course, would be the combo of the pointy ears and eyebrows, unreasonably snug clothing, deep voice and unnaturally shiny hair. Until recently I hadn't much considered the character's phlegmatic, if somewhat patronizing nature to be any factor. Yet as I revisited my old flame via TVLAND, a few nights ago, I realized that I had largely found that attractive as well (not necessarily now, mind you). Not knowing what Leonard Nimoy was like, it just seemed right and reasonable and if I may... logical, to assign my penchant to his Vulcan alter-ego. And although I thought this would be a fun enough revelation to share as a blip, I found my way to New York Times article, while searching for a delicious image of my alien love model this morning, and it is just too fascinating (and relevant) to pass up pointing out.

It turns out, that Mr. Nimoy is a noted and published photographer. Naturally, since I don't follow the personal lives of performers I like, I didn't know that. Apparently, he had a very successful run with his Shekhina project and during that time was approached by an obese woman who had asked if he would like to photograph her. The article ends with pointing out that while Nimoy finds his models beautiful, that he is not necessarily sexually attracted to them which, I think, is entirely fair and intriguing that it be his response after seeing all of these women naked.

The reason this blog ended up here, in a place where I am sharing my feelings about how to come to terms with my body image and what I want that image to be, should seem obvious once you have read the article. If you can't be bothered to read it, I'll try to put this as plainly as I can. That is, naked, I look just like these women. To see them being portrayed, not as monsterous, boil festering, filthy, smelly ogres is so new it shocked me to see these images. Even pornography aimed at men who desire women just like the models in this project, usually features the most degrading and grotesque caricatures of everything hateful you could assume of a fat woman.

As I have said before, while I do not find myself to be ugly, nasty, gross, or any other of the usual negative adjectives assigned to women of such weight, I have had more negative input on my body than any other aspect of my life. I was conditioned from the time I was a toddler, as most are, to consider women who look like these models... women who look like me, to be nothing short of disgusting. It is a conditioning I fight every single day. I'm terrified that if I don't fit into the culturally imposed idea of beauty and sexiness, that the deficit of affection, intimate companionship, romance and sexual expression burning a hole in me, will swallow me. Yet my refusal to succumb to that expectation (coupled with my upbringing), is precisely what got me into this predicament. The irony of that fact is not lost on me.

Yes, I do still have a shred of hope that there are men out there who are less concerned with body image and more concerned about ALL of the things that make up the attractiveness of a woman. I've held onto ridiculous amounts of hope for a long, long time. Believe me. I have soldiered through the immense pain brought on by men who have cared deeply for me but could not get past the social stigma of being with a large woman (even when they found me sexually irresistible). I have courageously exposed my hope on dating sites full of men who lust after large women, and learned that a large percentage of them want such a woman for all the wrong reasons (certainly where I am concerned. The two biggest being the misconception that we are either all completely lacking in self esteem, or ball busting Brunhildas). One man described what he imagined my body to look like in a way that I am certain to have been a pleasurable, sexual image, but literally made me want to throw up. Not because he was being nasty, but because everything he had described was exactly what I been being trained to abhor in others, and particularly hate in myself. Just remebering my reaction, now, terrifies me and I believe that moment was the catalyst for realizing that I need to change. fter all, it would never occur to me to hate another person for not being just like me. How sad that I would feel revulsion over someone who does?!

Finding one more man, willing to assert the notion that a flat stomach, tiny breasts and boyish hips are not the only attributes of beauty in a woman gave me the dose of hope I needed today.

So maybe Mr. Spock got all the looks,

but it looks like Lenny got all the character. Maybe I was on the right track after all! ;-)

Romance, the potholes in my road.

2008-01-15T04:53:00.000-08:00

Generally speaking, when I am not involving myself in looking for, or thinking of finding a romantic partner, I don’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about whether or not I’m attractive. Although it sounds egotistical or even self-deluding, I think I’m pretty. I’d date me. I’d date me and never let go! Yeah, I would probably support the me I’m dating to continue working toward regaining a healthier lifestyle, but it wouldn’t be a deal breaker that I wasn’t already there. Life, after all, is a journey. We’re all trying to get somewhere. For some, it’s not a big deal if the person they’re seeing is on their way, already there, or been there and ready to stop moving. But whether you agree or not (and I know at least one of my readers will), weight issues and financial distress are probably two of the biggest deal breakers no matter where you are in the journey and it isn’t until I have to consider myself through the eyes of others, in hopes of gaining their attention, that I begin to pick myself apart. When I start picking, it slows down my progress.

So, I have hit a pothole. While I repair the damage, let me talk to you about this a little, okay? Don’t worry, I’m pretty good at multitasking. Our chat won’t slow me down any more than I already am.

Recently I rejoined an online dating site. I’m not totally sure what made me do it. Maybe it was the success story I’d heard from a friend, maybe it was hearing how he was talking about his new girlfriend that made me think, “Awww, I want someone to think about me that way.” I don’t know. As usual, finding sexual activity hasn’t been a problem (unless you consider having to refuse it a problem, which I often do), so that wasn’t it. All I know is that almost as soon as I got started, I wanted to cancel my profile and I’m still debating that option.

Creating a profile is only slightly painful. While I clearly don’t have too much trouble talking about things that interest me, I do feel put out with “packaging” myself for a specific consumer. After all, if I knew how to advertise for the man I’m looking for, I feel certain someone would have bought my line of wares by now. The thing is, I’m a legitimately complicated person, full of all the right contradictions (like being girly but totally able to be one of the guys) and some that might piss a person off (I can be both deeply logical and emotional depending on the topic). The more I divulge, the more I feel each attribute requires definition or at least explanation. That’s bad. Really bad, considering that most men are less apt to read an epic, and I’m disinclined to try to synopsize all the crucial details that someone should know when deciding to hung out with me,much less try to date me. Eventually my description always misrepresents me in some regrettable way.

If I post that I like one thing or the other, these tastes are often the single minded focus of those who contact me and although they virtually never intend it, I end up getting frustrated over this element of their shopping experience and run away from them. Do people really not want to dig that deep before deciding whether or not to enter into a courtship of any kind? Of course, I might be more inclined to be patient if I was being approached by someone I found really, really attractive. That’s where it gets, well, shitty… on both sides.

When it comes to those who wish to pursue me, I do okay until it comes to posting photos; Rather, until I put up a full body shot. When I opened up this muddy can of romantic worms, I was getting pinged every five minutes by men ranging from 23 to 52. As soon as the full body shot was up, suddenly even ones I was chatting with regularly stop responding. So with one perfectly pleasant exception, suddenly the well was dry again. There’s only so often you can have this happen before you stop deciding it must be a coincidence. One man I had found really attractive blocked me mid conversation when the photo was posted. I won’t lie… that stings a bit. It’s happened before. Nowadays when something like that happens, I consider myself to have been spared words of abject disappointment. After all, rejecting is a nasty business. Only the truly despicable find pleasure in dashing someone's hopes of the ultimate hook up.

So, what about that “exception” guy? Isn’t he enough for now?

Ah yes, the one that stuck around. Like I said, this stuff is shitty on both sides and the truth is, based on what I read and what I saw, I wasn’t attracted enough to move forward. That’s not his fault by any stretch. He’s friendly, well spoken in his writing, enthusiastic, involved in his passions. He even sent me a link to some press that referred to him as handsome (my press pointed to my heft!). These are all things I desire and expect in a man. By all accounts he seems like a good guy; that which LA is in short supply. As is often the case, I found myself revisiting his profile in hopes that the last time I’d seen it I was just not open, not in a good mood. But for whatever reason, I just didn’t feel compelled. Feeling like crap over the idea of having to tell him, in any way shape or form, is what makes me want to throw in the towel. More often than not, this is precisely what my dating experience has been… talking to or going out with men whom I should feel lucky to date, feeling lukewarm and hoping that something will develop if I put in enough time. And while I think that some of my past dates deserve to wind up with someone who doesn’t care who they’re with (in the case of those who can’t put forth the most miniscule effort to make themselves desirable, even as a friend), many of them don’t. That is certainly the case for the man who was genuinely interested.

It pains me to feel like there is something wrong with me that is preventing me from connecting. And even though it's always nice to meet good people, I don't really have trouble making friends. I am not on a dating site, splaying my guts out like a sausage squeezed out of it's casing, in hopes of a bigger crop of male buddies.

If anyone had once suggested that I would find myself becoming increasingly closed off to the idea of finding the right man at this point of my life, I would have laughed my guttural, obnoxious laugh and shot some snarky yet playful remark indicating my utter disbelief. But here I am cramming whatever I can into the doorjamb to keep the heavy door to my heart from closing, and finally …the lock from latching. I get more and more closed off every year. And with each woeful attempt at connection, I feel increasingly idiotic for even trying. I honestly never thought I could reach this level of romantic pesimism in my life!

Despite the obvious limitations my flab brings to the table, what I feel doesn’t have anything to do with my body image. It is what I have experienced of dating thus far; the heaviness that weighs on my heart to tell a truly nice man that I don't want to date him, the pain of rejection when someone I am very attracted to feels that way about me, the anxiousness we both feel on that dreaded first date where we're hoping against hope that we won't have to have any more first dates and the deflation of spirit when we realize we are bound for another. It's all too much sometimes. And luckily, I know better than to believe being thin will change what I hate about this process.

So for those of you, my quiet readers, that believe my journey is one where all my effort is spent trying to attract a man and hoping the final destination to be “and they lived happily ever after,” it is most assuredly not. If it… if HE finally comes, I will consider it nothing short of a miracle. Not because I think my being fat makes me less of a catch, but because it is getting harder and harder to meet someone in a more organic way, all we have to go on with these dating sites is a list of ingredients. If I do find love it will be because this brilliant, attractive man figured out what I already know, hot or not, that I am loving and more importantly loveable.

Is Being Beautiful Worth Dying Over?

2007-12-20T05:17:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was reading a blog written by cult film icon Kevin Smith, about a girl who killed herself over the end of an online relationship with a boy she met on MySpace. The boy, creepily enough, turned out to be the 48 year-old mother of a neighborhood friend who was allegedly on an undercover mission to find out if the girl was talking shit about her daughter (for my thoughts about the supposed adult’s behavior in this, please see my other blog Sunny Spells It Out). Sadly, the girl, nor her vigilant mother, had any idea it was her friend’s mother she had been talking with for months when the imaginary boy named Josh Evans turned on her and crushed her hopes for romance. Perhaps if she had known, she may not have done so, but this turn of events was the final blow that prompted Megan Meier to hang herself by a belt in her closet.

Why? Why would this 13 year-old girl with beautiful, sparkly eyes, lovely skin, gorgeous hair, and a sweet smile (that would soon shed its metallic shield) decide that she had nothing left to live for? She lost the chance of love with a cute boy.

Think that’s silly? Ridiculous? I don’t. I think it is a tragedy of furious proportions, but hardly a shock. I’ve been where she was, and even now I wonder how I lived through it. You see, this pretty young lady struggled with her weight and as such was shocked to have found such a catch in the first place. As Smith points out, it sucks enough to be a teenager. It sucks even more to be a fat one. It sucks even harder to be a fat girl. Believe me, I know.

Of course, we all have our cross to bear. For some of us, it’s that we are too thin, too tall, can’t gain muscle no matter how we try, have no chin, or have acne that makes Bryan Adams look airbrushed. I suppose there is even the possibility that being too pretty or handsome might be troublesome to a youngster. The truth is there aren’t really that many people out there who had the “charmed” life of growing up. It’s easy to believe the opposite when we want to blame our shitty childhood for every rotten thing that befalls us today, but statistically speaking, just about everyone was in the SUCK during their teens. Yet even now, in a time if infinite information and cross-cultural and lifestyle acceptance, being fat still suffers an unending bastion of tormenters that crosses gender, race and most creeds. While it is politically incorrect to badmouth a person of color, religion or disability (at least in the US), we are still showered with permission to practically stone someone for being overweight. That’s hard enough to wrap one’s mind around being an intelligent, fairly logical thirtysomething. To try to fathom that at 13 is… well… almost unimaginable.

I won’t pretend to know exactly what must have been going through Megan’s mind when she came to the conclusion that there was no hope left in her life. After all, unlike myself at her age, She had been diagnosed with ADHD and severe depression and I suspect that if someone had given me those justifications for despair when I was 13, I might not be here to write to you today. To my mind, it is a dangerous thing to tell anyone of questionable mental state that they have been clinically diagnosed with virtually anything, because if it’s one thing people usually are looking for more than anything else, it’s something to excuse them from having to work on their problems (you know I’m right, think of how many people you have met that throw off their shitty behavior to their astrological sign!). That is not to say that there are not legitimate cases that need serious medical attention, but if you were to have run into the amount of people I have (in the last four years) that have been “diagnosed” as manic, you would start questioning the validity of these things , too. Trust me! I’m no hard-ass. People need help. But more than anything, they need to help themselves; including me. And that is rarely something that people are either expected or taught to do in this day and age. But what on Earth did this girl have to be that depressed about? Is being fat enough to warrant such drastic measures?

It feels like it, sometimes.

Unlike alcoholism, drug abuse, personal abuse (such as cutting) and other eating disorders (at least until ones bones are prominent), you can’t hide fat. You cannot quietly deal with or (revel in) your problem because it is out there for all to see. There is no sympathy because it is assumed depraved gluttony got you to that place, although it is not always the case. While everyone who judges you probably has an equally, if not worse vice, it is socially permissive to hate fat people. To that end, I am sure that there are those that behave as though they hate fat people because they the only group left to openly hate and they need someone to vent their rage to. So you feel as though you cannot lose it fast enough. Every day you do not see results, is another day when you feel as if everyone around you is disgusted by your very existence (and many will tell you they are). Before you know it, you are hating yourself for not being done, hating yourself for every slip up, every ounce not lost, every moment you’re not exercising, every date you were not asked out on, and it goes on and on. It is so easy to get into a spiral of self loathing and unless you have people around you that really know how to deal with that kind of thing, who know how to talk you off the ledge, you have to have a will of steel to not let it get you down. Toss the gasoline of lost love onto that fire and friends, I’m here to tell you, it’s a blaze that feels inextinguishable.

In my search for more on the story of this girl, I came across a video from ABC news. Something that caught my attention was that Megan’s mother is very petite, and relatively pretty (in that white-bread, mid-western, suburban way), while her father could easily have been a linebacker in college. I wondered if she had developed her own psychosis about her size or if she felt pressure to look more like her mother. So much so, in fact, I had to watch the video a second time to actually hear the interview. Mostly, I found myself looking at the subtext of what may have sent this girl over the edge. Although in all seriousness, she could have had all the support in the world from her loving parents and still felt like the loss of Josh Evans was enough of a reason. There is no way to know what could have been said, what could have been done to prevent this girl from making such a horrible decision. And ever since I’ve learned of this story, I haven’t been able to get her off my mind. I have been so sad and troubled and didn’t realize until tonight that it was this girl who was plaguing me.

You see, I have had to work very, very, very hard on myself to get to a place where I don’t feel like I would be lucky to get anyone at all to love me, solely because of my weight. It is an accomplishment I am profoundly proud of, because it meant undoing over 34 years of brainwashing by my mother, my former friends, schoolmates, co-workers, boys I admired, men I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole, my brother, teachers, movies, tv, magazines and comedians; all of whom have told me that I could never find love as long as I was fat. Up until very recently, I still believed that to the world, I was bottom of the barrel, last-resort material. If you had told me I would ever reach this place when I was 13, I would have silently believed you were either nuts, or an alien. I wouldn’t have even had the courage to tell you that you were wrong. After all, I was firmly convinced by all the aforementioned influences that I was a worthless, ugly, disgusting, unlovable creature because I was overweight (and at 13, no more than 40 pounds). It wasn’t something I had created in my mind. It was a belief that was being crammed down my throat every single day of my life, coming at me from all directions. Little has changed in how often I get that message, but my reaction to it has in spades. And I think of how Megan had to have had it even worse with the internet; with all the phonies and fakes, all the pretenders that one encounters on the internet. Even with her mother keeping a watchful eye on who her daughter was encountering, the keenest of maternal instincts couldn’t have foreseen the duplicity that would end her daughter’s life. The more I think about the whole thing, the more angry, the more absolutely fucking outraged I get!

Without even going into the fact that Josh Evans was a fictional being, one of the things that struck my heart the hardest was that in the video interview, Megan’s mother made mention of how shocked Megan was that Josh was so hot. My heart ached so bad it made me sick to my stomach. It was an unexpected jolt of recollection and commiseration. How many times had I felt that? How many times had it been a cruel prank or the boy buckled to peer pressure and backed out with hateful words? So many I cannot count and the ones I remember clearly are hard enough to think of. And I wonder now how many times it crossed my mind to end my life, and therefore my misery, when the truth came out. I wonder what made Megan cross that line when I didn’t, or couldn’t.

Sometimes it feels like that’s the only option to make the pain go away; the pain of alienation, of fear that you will never shed that which seemingly makes you unlovable. The way this story played out for Megan, I cannot say that I don’t understand her choice. Still, I wish she had more strength, more courage, more imagination to think that perhaps she would overcome her loss and find someone new. I wish Megan Meier had reconsidered her options and imagined the debt of pain she left behind that her parents now pay. More importantly, I wish someone had been able to convince her that it would pass before she had a chance to do the undoable.
Trying to become the socially perceived idea of beautiful is such an ugly road to tread. To put your worthiness, your loveable-ness, as it were, in the hands of the public at large is to give up your own opinion of yourself. You will never ever be smart enough, cool enough, pretty enough, whatever enough for everyone. Ever. EVER! And that is totally okay! Really! It is! Know why? Here’s why. Not everyone out there deserves to have their opinion of you matter. I learned that the hard way. And besides, despite that which the cults of celebrity and fashion dictate to us, there is an immeasurable amount of tastes out there. Even if you don’t find them attractive (which is a conversation for a whole other day), there are going to be plenty of people out there who will want you… sometimes quite badly. But the most important thing that schools rarely even attempt to teach, and many parents aren't deep enough to think of, is to love and value your life. You cannot get that love from anyone but yourself and it is essential. When you have it, nothing will keep you down forever. Nothing will make you fear being unloved ever again. Nothing will make you believe that your life isn’t worth living because you will value that life far too highly to give it up for anything. ANY… THING.

Megan, wherever you are… I am filled with grief know that this message couldn’t have and didn’t get to you in time. It would have been such a thrill to hear how you bested your dragons, and came out kickin’ asses and taking names. God, what a story that would have been, and just think of the lives you might have saved in the telling of it.

If The Shoe Doesn't Fit Try Another One

2007-12-16T04:15:00.000-08:00

A reader’s comment on my last post got me to thinking about fitting in and we all know that once I get to thinking, it's hard to stop. So, I'd like to share some honest reflection on the matter. As always, I welcome your thoughts. As you can see, I pay attention.

When I was a very little girl, I distinctly recall being utterly disinterested in being “normal” in any way. For the first several years, I was convinced that I was extraordinary in some fashion or another. Perhaps I might possess magical powers or a hidden ability to fly. Even now, I could swear that I can feel wings furled against my back and in times when I need comfort or protection, they enfold around me like the soft arms of a protective parent. And as to my magical powers, well, I’m still not convinced that I don’t have them. Of course, I don’t think of them as hocus pocus, Merlin-esque kinds of powers; but rather the kind of natural powers all animals are endowed with but as humans, we lose as we are socialized while growing up. So obviously, I hadn’t the faintest desire to slip submissively into the dull coma of supposed normality. It wasn’t until every abnormal thought or action or perceived weirdness (good and bad) was picked apart, ridiculed and squelched by someone whose acceptance was paramount to me, that I lost my way. I stopped knowing who I was and became who I was told I was. I began to want desperately to be as normal as possible and always failed because my heart wasn’t in it. While I believed for all that time that I wasn’t allowed to fit in, I know now that I made sure that I didn’t. Somewhere inside, that little girl still had her hand on some of the controls (bless her weird little heart!).

I’ll be honest and say that when I deeply respect, admire or am attracted to someone, my first instinct is to try to fit in with them. I try to maintain who I am, but if I feel they are not accepting me, it gets harder and harder to hold on. A reason for that may be that I have only just started to allow myself the freedom to live as I feel and have spent most of my life trying to squeeze myself into a proverbial shoe that never fit … namely, my family.

I have always felt like a satellite floating around outside their world, always making sure that everything was running smoothly, but never really getting to come in for a landing. Ironically, there are a lot of people out there who feel like they don’t fit in with their families. Maybe, on some level, it’s an unfortunate normality on my part; one of the few places I am exceptionally ordinary. Maybe it’s a good thing. Sometimes, knowing others are in the same boat, feeling just as alienated and ostracized as you, actually manages to offer some comfort. Still, if I’d had a choice from the get-go, I would never have signed up for that club.

Please, don’t be frightened of a public unloading of scary family details of an alarmingly over-personal degree. I really don’t have any desire to make you all uncomfortable. It is embarrassing to admit that it wasn’t that long ago that I would have had no problem in doing so, however. I have grown up and learned enough that I look at that part of my life now and see that some of what I have suffered is not really respectable and reasonable to broadcast and I no longer feel the need to campaign for yes-man sympathy. So I will just say that my family was very adept at using their love and acceptance as a bargaining chip for my silent and unwavering servitude. It wasn’t their only transgression, but one that definitely created a version of me that I work every day to bid adieu. And in the spirit of fairness, I have learned (though a hell of a lot of listening and observation), that like everything else they do in a desperate attempt to not be “found out” to be flawed and odd, they are not unusual in that sense. I don’t blame them, really. They just don’t look that deeply into themselves and their motives. I doubt they will ever fully understand how they lost me. But, it was the realization that I had done everything they had asked up to a point of literally giving up my life for them, and they still treated me like the token freak. When I finally grasped that and let go of ever wanting or needing their acceptance and unattainable love, I felt free.like an animal let out of a cage after a lifetime of captivity… as if I could fly.

There isn’t a group or sect or religion or belief that makes me want to be in that position ever again.

Now here I am, on a quest for something that I named “Journey to Hotness”, but it is about so much more than the title bespeaks (as I’m sure you know). It is an expedition to uncover a life where I am not being controlled by anyone or anything but my true self and that includes a body that was built on lies and pain. It is a mission to look in the mirror and recognize what I see as being me… Sunny. To be able to put on the clothes that make me feel comfortable and beautiful and happy. To be able to dance or walk or run or make love or fuck in the way my heart and body aches to do such things. I want to not worry so much about being easy prey for muggers or rapists because I can obviously not run, even if for my life. I want to know what it’s like to lower myself on top of a lover and enjoy the experience without worrying and wondering if I am crushing his bones. These are trifles to some, but they (and others) are and have nearly always been my most profound yearning . And the thing is, when all of these desires (which are reasonable to expect) come to fruition, I know I will feel more genuinely like myself than I have felt since I was a very little girl. And I know that it will make me beautiful. Maybe not to you and maybe not to your best friend or your boss or your doctor or your pot dealer or your ex-girlfriend and that suits me fine. I want it for me. Just… me. And if it makes anyone else happy in the process, well that’ll just be a bonus.

If there is some group out there that seems to fit me, the *real* me, then I’ll be okay to fit in. I feel that way about the people I love. And to all others, they most certainly will get either a physical or spiritual flipping of the bird as my thoughtful reader suggests. My life is not to be spent trying to fit in with or to fall into line with anyone; not any more.

I’m excited. The more I see who I really am, the more I feel filled with joy and the more I remember the seedling I once was. I want to know what kind of amazing things that little girl who wished on stars and wrote songs about cartoon characters and didn’t care if her outfits were like everyone else’s grew up to be. I just know it’s gonna rock tits when I finally do. ;-)

The Eye of The Beholder

2007-12-11T00:10:00.000-08:00

When I moved to the Los Angeles area from Silicon Valley almost seven years ago, my main purpose was to work for a specific entertainment company that I had been a fan of for my entire life (and I achieved that goal, thank you for asking). However, one of the perks of moving to a place like LA was that I had it my mind that I would be far less likely to be bandying about with romance. The idea was to literally set myself up in a place where it was almost ridiculously difficult to get a date due to the image issues for which the area is renowned, and therefore would force me to concentrate on more important things; things like developing a real career, perhaps finishing school, doing some respectable performing and maybe even finding out who I really am now that I would be away from those who spent my lifetime telling me who that was.

For the most part, LA didn’t fail to deliver the absurd constraints of image related judgment that I had expected. Conversely, I do get hassled less here than I did in Silicon Valley, about my appearance, but it is obvious that most of the people I run into wish I fit the “beautiful people” stereotype of the community a bit better.

Case in point, when I was reviewed for a show I was in a couple of years ago, the reviewer gave me high praise (the highest of the cast), but couldn’t help but inject a comment about my weight. “Sunny brings life to the evening whenever she is onstage, throwing both her considerable physical and psychological weight into each of several hilariously fleshed out characters…” When I sent out the entire review to my friends and family, very few were not fiercely upset as to the fact that my size was so brazenly insulted. I had to remind them that in a place like this, for that reviewer to find a fat woman entertaining had to have been somewhat of a surprise and therefore more respected. I didn’t find his comment to be insulting so much as to say, “This big woman kicked ass and took names. I didn’t need her to be a size 2 and perfect to find her work exciting.” Maybe that’s putting a sugar coating on it, but I’m okay with that if it is.

Going to the gym in LA has its lion share of image weirdness, particularly the one CB and I frequent. Unlike the 24 Hour Fitness (that closed at midnight, oddly enough) up North, our gym is packed to the rafters with sweaty, panting, young and hot entertainment industry folks. Considering that the gym is located within five miles of several major studios, this was hardly unexpected. But unlike a good deal of my experience with Los Angeles, this is one of the places that borders on the comically stereotypical of what you would expect of a gathering of Hollywoodians to be. Every conversation somehow turns to industry networking. Being about as little of a “player” in the entertainment business as one can possibly be, it is always funny to listen to people make themselves more important than they really are, in hopes that if they keep talking, their audience will somehow lend them a hand in making their fantasy a reality. This particular brand of the LA cliché is often amusing, but mostly just sad.

The other night, sitting in the Jacuzzi after a particularly brutal but rewarding work out, a man who could have been in his late thirties, but obviously had done some “hard living” and looked closer to fifty made his way into the tub with his hyper-clingy (and I believe heavily drugged) girlfriend. The nauseatingly oversexed pair settled in with CB, two young gentlemen and myself and he immediately began schmoozing while his moll made sure to smother him in PDAs to ensure that CB and I don’t get any crazy ideas about her “catch”.

Now, this incident was certainly not the first of the schmoozing kind, but it was certainly the most transparent. It was clear that whoever this man was (he looked familiar but not familiar enough to place) hoped to do some serious networking. Too bad he wound up in the hot tub with an attorney, a newbie of two weeks to both LA and the biz, an animation color stylist and an ex-secretary. As he made his way around the circular bubbling brew of potential connections, I couldn’t help but feel a little bad for him. I would be the last of the tubmates to interrogate and I assumed that I had the least to offer in terms of what he seemed to be seeking. Apparently, I was wrong.

After a quick couple of exchanges, he actually managed to size me up fairly well as someone who enjoys wordplay and suggested that I quit doing whatever it is that I have been doing for a living and try my hand at writing. I said, “I am a writer. In fact I’m writing a one-woman show about being a big woman searching for love in a place like Los Angeles.”

I had expected, based on his friendly demeanor, for the schmoozer's response to be something supportive without being condescending and for the subject to be dropped. Instead, the response he delivered up, as his lady friend smothered his head in kisses while sitting with her legs wrapped around his neck, was, “I’ll take you on!” About that time, a young, handsome black man was entering the Jacuzzi and settling in where the attorney had vacated. Picking up on the conversation, he chimed in, “I love big women! The bigger the woman, the bigger the love.” The two men began waxing poetic, in earnest, about the joys of large women. So much so, in fact, I actually felt uncomfortable and I could see that CB was more than a little miffed when words like, “I hate skinny women” began to fly. She is, after all, a very thin woman.

I politely laughed off the advances and made a foolhardy mistake in attempting to point out the folly of their assumption that all big women are big lovers. I have known too many big women who are just as selfish and steeped in angry insecurity as a starved starlet may be. They were disinterested in hearing that the stereotype, albeit a wobbly attempt at being somewhat sycophantically approving, was wrong; even if it was coming from the horse’s proverbial mouth. It was about that time that I noticed CB’s temperature rising from the anti-thin sentiment brewing, and with my fingers and interest in the conversation growing more clammy by the minute, I motioned to CB to go.

Once we were safely out of earshot, back in the locker room I turned to CB and said, “You know what I find funny about that entire conversation?” Still angry at being inadvertently ostracized, she shot me a sharp, “What?!” To which I said, “Even though they fancied themselves to be fans of the fat chick, they still assumed that I had not found the love I was seeking. I never said I didn’t find it, but they assumed I hadn’t. Interesting isn’t it?” She agreed, but I could tell that her feeling of having been insulted was of more interest to her at the time.

As we were leaving, the black man who had been extolling the virtues of big women happened to be standing by the reception desk. I shot him a brief smile and made my way out. When we were clear of the door, CB pointed out that she shot him a dirty look and wagged her finger at him in disapproval. It hurts her just as much to feel judged about being model thin, as I have for being the exact opposite. I try to soothe her spirits when these instances arise, but her anger is bigger than me. She has not yet reached a place where she accepts that practically everyone suffers from some sort of stereotyping. She hasn’t fully absorbed the calming knowledge that almost everyone has had some reason to be alienated, ostracized and / or ridiculed and that she can choose to blow off someone not finding her attractive as nothing more than a matter of taste and leave it at that. I understand how she feels. It took me over a decade to get to a place where I am not engulfed in rage every time an attractive man looks at me like I am a mountain of rotting meat.

Beauty, sexiness, attraction, hotness and even disgust… it is all very much in the eye of the beholder. That leaves me to wonder... whom do I wish to behold me as hot other than myself? When I think of wanting to be sensual, sultry and lovely, should I also concern myself with who my audience may be? Maybe so… maybe so.

This Ten Pounds Looks Familiar

2007-12-08T02:36:00.000-08:00

There's something funny to me about the idea of "losing" weight. It's not so much the practice (which I consider to be about as hilarious as prostate cancer), but rather the wording. Yes, I know it is the process of ridding oneself of the weight and therefore, in this case, losing it is a good thing. But to me, when one loses something there is always that possibility of finding the very thing you lost (whether you lost it on purpose or not). Wouldn't you agree? So I think, in the spirit of making this a permanent change in my life, I am going to call the weight reduction portion of my journey to hotness something more determined and solid like "Weight Eradication" or "Weight Abolition." Why not "Weight Reduction" you say? I see where you're headed with that, but again, the idea of reducing something still sort of implies that it can be regrown and we don't really want that. Do we?

Being a fan of the thought process that is currently being marketed as "The Secret", because it works like a freaking charm, I am realizing more than ever that my thoughts determine a lot of what goes on in my life. And yes, for those of you readers that are skeptical I hear your rationalization of why you believe that concept to be bub kiss. Maybe it works for some people and not for others but I have tested it, tried it, and found little but success in making sure that my thoughts deliver me what I want. In that vein, I have decided that I need to re-tool my thoughts about getting rid of my excess fat in order to succeed. Because, let's face it, I've lost plenty of weight. The thing is, I always seem to find it again... and all its' friends and a few extra.

Stepping on the scale at the gym on Wednesday, and realizing that I had to drop down to a lower increment of fifty pounds to measure my weight, was thrilling. Still, I've lost this weight before and I stood there feeling like I had no real right to get excited. Ten pounds (which I have lost in the two weeks since I started, and largely - I think - due to the stress and activity from my heinous move) is not that big of a deal for me to lose. Three years ago, I had seen the underside of 300 for the first time in my life since I was in my early twenties, and even that didn't manage to keep me on the straight and narrow. So my latest accomplishment was met with pleasure and dubiety. I've lost that ten pounds so many times, it's ri-goddamned-diculous. So this time, I have decided that instead of having lost it, I have dispatched it, dispensed with it, fucking destroyed it. I won't ever see that ten pounds again. Ever.

To all you other pounds that await your demise, I bid you a bittersweet farewell. You provided an exceptional service of a blubbery buffer between my vulnerable heart and others for many years and that was exactly what I had intended you to do. Bravo. But after you had been gone for a while and I invited you back for a return engagement when I needed your protection, you slacked off just when I needed you most. I got more dates with you around than I did when you were gone. So clearly you have lost your effectiveness, your power, your ability to serve your purpose. Firing didn't do the trick. You just found your way back. No, death is the only way and my little friends, I shall enjoy executing you. I really, really will.

Soreness Means My Journey Has Officially Begun

2007-12-01T06:14:00.000-08:00

It is hard to know whether going back to the gym just before moving from my apartment (to a shared condo) was a phenomenally excellent idea, or fantastically retarded one. Despite the knowledge that having done so means I have a bit more stamina for this epic event, at the moment, I'm leaning toward retarded. Nevertheless, I know that all the soreness I feel is the precursor to what? That's right! HOTNESS!

Oh yes, I know I have a long haul ahead of me fraught with peril and antiperspirant and constantly parading naked chicks that bring me back to my "dressing in the gym bathroom" days of high school. If I thought my teenage classmates' bodies were intimidating then, going to a gym in the heart of the entertainment industry is, well... well it's just fucking worse! The other night as I peeked in the door of the sauna on the way to the jacuzzi, this was the thought that crossed my deeply heterosexual mind, "I've never seen so much tit and muff in my fucking LIFE! Can these women not put on a fucking TOWEL?!?!?!" Maybe if I thought I was the shit, I wouldn't wear a towel either. I would, however, ensure that my purr fur was in check, unlike one of the naked broads in the sauna that night.

What makes this adventure more fun and interesting, is that I am doing my workouts with my friend CB who is the kind of thin most of the people we are working out with wish they could be and for her it's virtually effortless. The two of us together catch a lot of attention as we make our way to the workout area that overlooks the 101 and while I would love to think it's because all the fine Hollywoodians are revelling in our beauty and happy to see us amongst the sweating masses, I doubt that's it. We look like "before" and "after" gone EXTREME, which as most of you know, is something Hollywood is pretty famous for. While eyes seem to be appreciating CB's taut, perfectly flat stomach, flabless thighs and minimalist chest, as they make their way to me, the looks change from ones of appreciation to almost abject horror. Once upon a time that would have been enough to make me feel uncomfortable and sad and would be my excuse to not want to go. Now, it inspires me to keep going, to keep forging my own view of myself and to base my actions on that view. It's nice to have roomfuls of hot, sweaty, young Los Angelian hunkybutts look at me as though they wish I'd go back to Bally's, and not feel daunted... to not really care. Frankly, that drives home the fact that my journey really isn't about them, some imaginary guy that will reap the rewards of all my labors or even you (much as I value your opinion!). It's about me and what I think of myself. And as I sit here, revving myself up to go do the last big push of moving out of my apartment, feeling sore and achy, I feel good. I feel stronger. I feel happy to be doing something to move forward. I may not feel like a smoldering love goddess, but I feel like I'm on my way. I'll feel even more so when I can finally take a shower again.

Moving is not hot.

2007-11-30T03:16:00.000-08:00

My moving is going to be a good idea in practice, when all is said and done, but the process is causing me to be decidedly unhot. Jesus, I didn't even realize I could go in reverse from where I started!

Having lived at the Howard Street apartment for almost seven years, I have come to realize a few things about choosing one's living arrangement for optimal hotness. First, have a parking space. This is essential to getting your beauty sleep and reducing stress. Don't believe me? Fact: when I recently threw out my back, I had to sit in my car for four hours waiting for a parking space within four blocks of my apartment. Have you ever thrown your back out? That was my first time. It was deeply unpleasant and unfamiliar and truly stressful (especially considering I had to evacuate a hotel for a fire during the worst of it). Stress, as we know, is not good for one's skin. Ergo, no parking? Pimpleface, puckermouthed sourpuss. SO NOT HOT!

Location, location, location. I solemnly swear to never, ever have a bedroom that is right next to someone's kitchen and a few short feet from a laundry room. Nothing like waking up to Filipino barbecue wafting into your window and realizing that you might actually be getting some fat deposited on your face. Then there's the thick layer of fuzz on virtually EVERYTHING in the room. Dusting is shitty enough. But as I have been unburying my things from the layers of dust AND lint, I find myself wondering how much of this stuff I've swallowed and conversely, how much of it was sitting on my skin all night, baking in while I slept in the unbearable summer heat. I wonder if lint and dust are fattening. Hmmmm.

Air conditioning is essential. I think that might help dust from baking into my skin. Just a hunch. Also not sleeping due to heat sucks hard. Having to sleep in one's car when the power goes out and it's so hot you cannot breathe, then being eaten alive by bugs is not exactly a recipe for being a penacle of beauty the next day.

Now it's three in the morning, I've spent several hours trying desperately to make sense of all my stuff. I want Niecy Nash (from Clean House) to come in and rescue me from my mayhem and foolishness, but she's nowhere to be found. I also need to shower and I can't because I've not yet purchased a shower curtain for my new place and cleverly removed all the towels from the old one. Not hot.

I think the next time I'm going to move, I won't put off packing until the last effing moment. I feel certain that would make me more attractive. Maybe not to anyone else but me, but hey... that's okay.

The Journey Begins

2007-11-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

I've been fat pretty much my whole life now. Even when I wasn't fat, I was being convinced that I was. I've been through varying degrees of "screw it, I'm tired of trying", to "this is someone else's fault not mine" and finally to, "if I don't do something soon, I'm going to fucking die... literally" and everywhere in between. I'm sure there have been times when I even invented places to take my mental state about my body that I shouldn't mention on the Internet. Whatever. The point is that my body started to shut down on me this year (after 50 plus hours nailed to a desk sending people on overpriced vacations) and I panicked. I couldn't walk. I could barely breathe walking from the car to the office. It was bad. Really, really bad.

The closer I am getting to forty, which is wicked fucking quick, the harder I find change to be. That will shock people who know me because I've always been one to make changes pretty easily. Of course, my weight situation has always been one that's changed and changed back a thousand and a half times. But for some reason, in virtually all other areas of my life, if I wanted to make a change, BAM!!!! I made the change. Now? Not so much. If I don't put some serious focus on this, I'm going to never know what it would be like to be me entirely. Not just in personality but in physicality. Because friends I am here to tell you, that in my mind, I run. I run like the wind. I hike. I go for walks instead of sitting down to watch yet more television. I am limber and healthy and bouncy and fun. In my mind, that is.

My body doesn't match my mind and heart as it once did. The lumbering mass I became was a fitting visage to the carefully cultivated self doubt and well placed blame that permeated my life. Yeah, I have a few people who helped build this monster, but admittedly, I became the zombie-esque tubby butt that the frightened villagers chased after with the pitchforks and never looked back.

The funny thing is, I wanted to be this way. I had lost over seventy pounds when I was with my ex. When it was over, I wanted nothing to do with romance, sex and therefore men and I made a conscious decision to pack it back on. I never knew it would careen out of control. I never knew I would end up getting on a scale at a doctor's office and not have the scale register my weight. It never occured to me that my back might go out, and I would have to sit like a blob in a scooter to get around Disneyland (where I normally power through like a coked up camp counselor) and endure the looks of disgust and disapproval from practically everyone I encountered, including the cast members. When I took the job I took last February, I was in desperate need of an opportunity. What that potential opportunity did to my body is absolutely, bar none, the worst thing I have ever done to myself. By the end of my time there, I was hollowed out, exhausted and most likely forty to fifty pounds heavier than when I went in.

I believe in myself. I believe in what I can accomplish. I also believe that I have convinced myself that I cannot lose the weight. It was stuck in my mind that I would never get this done and I kept listening... kept believing. But I have tested out some of the methods I plan to use and know they work. Now is the time of believing in what I can achieve when I put my mind to it.

What exactly am I trying to achieve? It's not a number. It's not a dress size. It's a feeling. It's a state of mind. I want to look in the mirror and say to myself, "That bitch is fucking HOT!" There. I said it. No, I know it's not a noble pursuit. I know it's probably not even really the healthiest. But there it is. I know that all the important stuff will fall into line with that goal like stamina, healthier lifestyle, etc. But I'm tired of being surrounded by women who have what I've only dreamt of in the way of physiques and looks, and being angry with them for doing nothing with it. The only reason I feel that way is that I can't just do it myself. That sucks all the way around.

If you choose to go on this journey with me, all I ask is that you just go along for the ride. Don't try to take the reigns. I want to share this with you, but if there's one thing that shuts me down it's too many people trying to direct the journey. I know what to do. I'll do it or not do it. I know what works. If I need help, I promise I'll ask. So just sit back, relax and come with me. Enjoy the ride. It ought to be an interesting one.